Inside

  1. the same cake, again
  2. inscrutable shape of longing
  3. a densely wooded hill
  4. a thousand channels
  5. towards horizontality
  6. a boundary, a suggestion
  7. a boundary, a demarcation
  8. the space between
  9. what can the light tell us?
  10. is this the revolution?
  11. right of refusal
  12. against the archive
  13. transverse orientation
  14. can my work be a poem?
  15. production valued
  16. in/ /between
  17. stories told, forgotten
  18. by/product
  19. what’s left behind

Outside

  1. a search for home
  2. yəhaw̓
  3. new archives
  4. the alice gallery


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2. the inscrutable shape of longing


2023, Bellevue Art Museum
5-video channel and 6-audio channel installation









Curatorial statement, by David Strand:

In her sculptures and installations, Satpreet Kahlon explores the messiness, contradictions, and nuances of living inside a body shaped both by one’s own lived experience and one’s cultural and ancestral history. Kahlon was born in Bhagowal near the Pakistani border and raised in the United States. As a child of the Panjabi diaspora, Kahlon’s familial history is deeply intertwined with the precarious aftermath of colonization and geographic displacement. As writer and academic Saidiya Hartman writes, "the loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them." To explore these histories and how they have come to bear, Kahlon is building an immersive installation that delves into what has been lost and cannot be recovered while cultivating the possibility for healing and comfort.

The installation will be a multisensory constellation of video, image, sound, and salvaged materials. The central body of the installation is a web-like net woven with found materials, from scraps of wood and cardboard to personal photographs and objects to Panjabi textiles, jewelry, and beads. Each of these elements carries its own history and suite of associations that reflects Kahlon’s own bodily experience and history. A suite of videos will be projected over this hanging web, including archival footage of Panjabi folk rituals that display celebratory and playful expressions of gender fluidity. This handful of videos will then be refracted into hundreds of tiny fragments reflected across the gallery by pieces of mirrored acrylic hung in the web.

From this splintered array of images, sounds, and objects, Kahlon aims to conjure a contemplative atmosphere for viewers to consider their own ancestral history, memories, and voids. How does trauma, displacement, and abuse live alongside kinship, adornment, and joy? How do these forces shape a person’s body and health? What should be shared and what needs to be protected? This exhibition is an invitation to sit with personal and collective loss, to move beyond the façade and into the body, to face the void, and find new sources of nourishment.  









This project was partially funded by 4Culture and The Dale & Leslie Chihuly Foundation.